Making Chaos Rhyme With Class, Er, Gas

There are many contenders for the title of the most obnoxious person on Broadway. I’m sure you could rattle off a dozen deserving candidates. But though it’s early in the season, one man has already put in his bid with such insistently annoying — and supremely entertaining — style that we may as well concede the honors to him right now. Mark Rylance, step forward and claim your crown.

In the bombastic, flatulent title role of David Hirson’s play “La Bête,” which has its own problems with uncontrolled gas, Mr. Rylance delivers a comic performance of such polished crudeness that it easily ranks with his Tony-winning tour-de-farce in “Boeing-Boeing” of two years ago. In that production (which, like “La Bête,” was directed by the inventive Matthew Warchus), Mr. Rylance portrayed a classically passive, put-upon patsy, the innocent rube to whom wild and crazy things happen.

Here he mans up to become the comic aggressor, the unstoppable, primitive force of chaos that rages through Mr. Hirson’s 1991 play in verse about the ruination of theater, set in the age of Molière. And while he is more than ably partnered by David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley in this revival, mounted with eye-popping élan by Mr. Warchus and the designer Mark Thompson, Mr. Rylance is by far the best reason to revisit “La Bête,” which opened on Thursday at the Music Box Theater. His performance also turns out to be the undoing of the play’s argument.

Even critics who didn’t like “La Bête” in its original production were impressed by its audacity. The young Mr. Hirson had dared to compose an entire work in rhyme at a time when verse drama seemed as archaic as candles in footlights. What’s more, he had appropriated the style of Molière, the God of classical French comedy, to condemn the cultural wasteland of the late 20th century.

Photo

Mark Rylance stars as the boorish, bombastic Valere in the revival of “La Bête,” at the Music Box Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“La Bête” pits a boorish parvenu playwright against an established figure of loftier theatrical pursuits (whose name, Elomire, is an anagram for you-know-who). Mr. Rylance is, of course, the boor, Valere, a one-man theater troupe who has been taken up by a mighty royal personage. (A prince in the original version, the character has undergone a sex change, which makes room for the delightful Ms. Lumley.)

This Princess is also the patron of the august Elomire (Mr. Hyde Pierce) and his company, and has decided that her two pet geniuses should collaborate. Elomire, who has the harsh judgmental instincts of Molière’s Misanthrope, sees in Valere’s arrival the wreckage of all things noble in the Drama. It’s high art meets low art (a confluence much on the minds of culture pundits two decades ago), and something’s gotta give.

The essential problem with “La Bête,” and this seems even truer now than it did in 1991, is that Mr. Hirson never makes much of a case for Elomire’s side. The show’s first half-hour (and its high point) is built around a protracted, careering monologue from Valere, who, having dined at Elomire’s table, proceeds to deliver a sustained ode to the importance of being Valere.

This oration is replete with malapropisms, misquotations and egregious faux pas. (Note to the squeamish and bookish: a chamber pot is used in view of the audience, and pages ripped from weighty tomes serve as toilet paper.) Elomire and his venerable colleague Bejart (a very good Stephen Ouimette) are reduced to looking on in horror while Valere goes on about his sexually and academically precocious childhood, his theatrical triumphs throughout Europe and, above all, his love of “verbobos” (his own word for words).

Photo

From left, Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce are featured in “La Bête.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Hyde Pierce is a first-rate glowering straight man. But Mr. Rylance’s Valere is a force of nature, a destructive force, perhaps, but also a revitalizing one. From the dawn of drama, there has always been a place for human beasts that acknowledges the irresistible energy in their anarchy. In recent years the type, as interpreted on film, has ruled the box office, with stars like Jack Black, Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell celebrating the high-voltage appeal of unbridled crassness and stupidity.

Tricked out with a Jerry Lewis overbite, a middle-American accent and a dry cleaner’s nightmare of stained, mismatched clothes, Mr. Rylance lets us feel the full impact of such brutish verve unleashed live on a stage. Yet this remarkable British actor, who has delivered some of the most vibrant Shakespearean performances I’ve seen, gives us more than id run wild.

His Valere is a diversely inflected, animated dictionary of imperfectly received ideas. And when he’s bloviating (in monologues that run to hundreds of lines), he’s a free-associating whirlwind of cultural trends and catchphrases, snatched, as if from the air, to define his own magnificence. Yet a melancholy and insecurity underpin the vulgarity, a sense that Valere is afraid of what he’ll hear if he stops talking.

Valere may be the epitome of all that’s wrong with our shallow, fragmented, inattentive culture. (And the play’s argument against ill-informed, sensation-driven entertainment is, if anything, more relevant than it was when it was written.) But as Mr. Rylance presents him, this grotesque buffoon is also touchingly human, and when he puts on a silly, pretentious play (at the Princess’s insistence), you feel the presence of an artist’s anxious heart.

Photo

Mark Rylance in “La Bête.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Combine that aspect of his performance with its throbbing inexhaustibility, and how can you not root for him? There’s logic in the championing of Valere by the capricious Princess, whom Ms. Lumley portrays with a savvy grasp of the combustible metabolism of power.

Elomire exists only as a naysayer. There is no real first-hand evidence of what he stands for. And Mr. Hirson, rather like Valere, seems to be treading water as the play progresses, covering up a sense that he doesn’t know where he’s going with half-baked arguments and semantic game playing. (The character of a maid who can speak only in monosyllabic rhymes is as tedious as it is whimsical.) Even with Mr. Rylance blundering away center stage, an air of deflation sets in by the play’s second half.

The production looks gorgeous, evoking the worldlier canvases of the French Baroque era. Mr. Thompson has conceived his set as a desecration-ready temple to words that includes a witty French lexicon of a drop curtain and a central set walled in books. But as vital as words are to theater, it’s the human pulse of acting that makes live theater alive. Strangely enough, “La Bête” is let down by its words, as Mr. Rylance’s refined study in vulgarity triumphs in a far too-lopsided battle.